Does anyone have any general advice for handling these. (Other than send them back and tell them to embed the fonts properly)

Specifically those PDFs supplied with fonts not embedded, at the moment it seems to work best to let my PC RIP insert PC fonts when they are the usual Microsoft freebies.

I've only got PitStop running on a Mac, I'm a bit wary of embedding the Mac versions of the fonts that come with Microsoft Office but since we are being asked to often make amends or supply 'PDF proofs' I can't rely on the RIP picking them up.

I'm just wondering what other people in pre-press do or advise, do you have a PC version of Pitstop as well as a Mac.

Also when asked to do text edits on these pdfs, what are people in general doing, if the font is subset, I seem to have to un-embed it first then make the edits then re-embed (although Acrobat 5 often lets me edit where 6, 7 and 8 don't).

I'll be just as happy to hear responses that say "we always send them back", I'm just interested in what others are doing.

I'm sometimes told that the Word files are unavailable because the pdfs are taken from the web and thats all the customer can get hold of. Sometimes pdfs are supplied by people who do not even have Acrobat Reader because their IT dept won't let it be installed.

If possible I ask for the native file(s), and a PDF. In case of emergency I am mostly able to do fixes on the native file and recreate the PDF.

I always reply them a PDF-proof with a 'mind the gap' comment about reflows and text possibly dropping out of tables (f.i.: Times Truetype vs Postscript version is known to cause reflows). I also mention the colourconversion (fluorescent colors !). Sometimes I supply hard-copy colorproofs.

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Also when asked to do text edits on these pdfs, what are people in general doing, if the font is subset, I seem to have to un-embed it first then make the edits then re-embed (although Acrobat 5 often lets me edit where 6, 7 and 8 don't).

Which tool are you using for text-editing? If I recall it correctly sometimes the touch up text tool from Acrobat 7 works better than the Pitstop tool does. You might want to try those both and see if it makes a difference. Also, copying a piece of text with the Pistop copy tool, replace in the proper section and use that for the text-editing sometimes helped me out of trouble.